Most Amazing Cover Ever

In a wild departure from my semi-serious thoughts, everyone should check out the cover and the following two pages from this report:

http://www.nsba.org/HPC/NewsIssues/Issues/School-Boards-Circa-2010-Governance-in-the-Accountability-Era.aspx

Now, that is a report from the National School Board Association. A national report. From a national organization.

And so I throw this out:

1) Can anyone possibly think of where they got this from? So far, the best answer has been your high school algebra text book cover.

2) What do you imagine the conversation went like when they sat down to make the cover?

3) Does anyone else have an awesome cover on some report to rival this?

As prizes, I will give more shout-outs since apparently whoever the hell is reading this is a sucker for them, as my readership shot up by like 90 people in the last rambling post.

NY Times, you wily paper you.

This one goes out to Ben Cooper and Rob Morgan, who independently and without any prompting, mentioned my blog to me. Also, when I hit 500 views, I think I can sell out and get endorsements. Alright.

So, let's grade the president! To grade him, we have a usual cast of characters: Diane Ravitch, Michelle Rhee, a teacher, the guy who always advocates for school choice (seriously, I think he only has one move... everyone knows he is going right... zing!), this guy ("the intellectual father of the economic integration movement," i.e., the movement that sounds great but will never happen), and Bruce Fuller, a professor from UC Berkeley, who I will get to below.

I am going to focus on Ravitch and Fuller.

First, Ravitch: seriously, what's your deal? For those of you who don't know, Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of ed and had some role at NAEP, and in 2005 wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation." Then she changed her mind, said it was a bad idea, wrote a book, and now she yells at Duncan and Obama and Gates. This is what I don't get: why do people give her such heed when she was pumped about NCLB, changed her mind, and now opposes it? This rhetorical act is absurd to me, but everyone buys it: "I was wrong, I get it now, so now I am always right." And everyone thinks she is right now. I don't get it. She was incredibly wrong about something, so she can't be wrong again? What? How does that make any sense? Just because she admits fault does not make her faultless in the future.

Hey, I was wrong once in 2005. I will never be wrong again. With that being established...

Now we move on to these fun quotes:

Ravitch: These "reforms" are not likely to improve U.S. education. Charter schools on average do not perform better than regular public schools.

Fuller: Three national studies have now shown that the average charter student fails to outperform the average peer attending a public school.

Okay, let's actually look at this in two ways.

First, "charter schools" versus "public schools" is a ridiculous comparison: there are bad charters, medium charters and good charters; there are bad public schools, medium public schools and good public schools. There is no one or the other. In thinking about a comparison, though, I can't think of one-- anyone think of a public good offered with public dollars that operates outside of public regulations that has a corollary with the first two but inside public regulations? Perhaps something like economic development (convention center?), but that is a one-off case. Regardless, though, the comparison does not work on a comprehensive level. However, that will not stop people from doing it!

Which brings us to Fuller's "three national studies" and Ravitch's "on average" charters aren't better. Well, let's look at the studies: thank you Wikipedia. You know what, Fuller, we can switch your sentence: "The average charter student fails to outperform the average peer attending a public school" could become, "The average peer attending a public school fails to outperform a charter student," or, to eliminate syntactic bias, we could just say, "On average, charters perform similarly to public schools." We could do the same thing with Ravitch.

Oh but you didn't, Richard. So, I guess I will just have to go to the most authoritative of those sources, the CREDO study. And what did they find? Well, they found that first thing you mention:

"While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference."

But they also found this:

"The report found several key positive findings regarding the academic performance of students attending charter schools. For students that are low income, charter schools had a larger and more positive effect than for similar students in traditional public schools. English Language Learner students also reported significantly better gains in charter schools, while special education students showed similar results to their traditional public school peers.

The report also found that students do better in charter schools over time. While first year charter school students on average experienced a decline in learning, students in their second and third years in charter schools saw a significant reversal, experiencing positive achievement gains.

The report found that achievement results varied by states that reported individual data."

It's more complex than you say, but you don't care about that, do you, Ravitch and Fuller? You have to have known this, right? Those quotes are from the press release; I didn't even have to open the whole thing. So why do you write things like that? Come on, you are Diane Ravitch and Bruce Fuller-- if I can't trust you, who can I trust?

Nobody reads.

Somehow I got redirected to a random education blog this morning, which highlighted the PISA (an international test designed to give some idea of comparative performance). The blog highlights reading scores by free and reduced lunch levels and shows how the USA actually does quite well when wealthier schools are considered. However, in trying to track down the data, I clicked on one link, and then another, and then another.

As I clicked, the blogs became slightly more politicized and critical. The one that spurned this post writes:

"There is, however, someone who recognizes that the data is being misinterpreted. NEAToday published remarks from National Association of Secondary School Principals Executive Director, Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, that have taken "a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores on PISA compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunch program for students below the poverty line." Tirozzi pointed out, “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.” Tirozzi demonstrates the correlation between socio-economic status and reading by presenting the PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established."

So I thought, huh, I should download the full data set and do it myself to see if I could. But I couldn't-- I couldn't find the free and reduced lunch variable in the PISA dataset.

But you know what I could find-- the exact table and statistics on reading levels and poverty in the appendix to the report (table r4, page 16). It's right there-- it wasn't Tirozzi who performed this amazing analysis. The NCES just did it themselves-- but nobody reads the full report. Ever. And then education bloggers all over go crazy-- "Look at what they left out! Thank God we are so much smarter than that government! We are so smart and critical."

Charter School Accountability

A common criticism lobbied at charters is that they can pick and choose who comes to their school, and they can more easily remove students from their school. This leads to artificial inflation of performance, for they are not doing the same job that traditional public schools are because they have that ability.

This can be seen in the first comment on The Notebook article in response to Marc Mannella's publication of the KIPP Open Book. The comment writes:

"Marc

Thank you for your post. I like the concept of an Open Book. Maybe you can do a follow up post where you share both your struggles and strategies to retain your students. I noticed in your Open Book Executive Summary , that KIPPs retains 87%-90% of your students. What are the reasons you loose your students? What does the quanative and qualative data say about those students? What percentage of students leave because KIPP is not the right educational fit?

There is this perception that some charter schools dump students that dont fit their mold.

It is great that you are willing to be transparent to settle these perceptions."

While it seems that this commenter took the time to navigate to here, the commenter did not take the time to read the graph that KIPP clearly presents right next to the retainment data: in 2008-9, KIPP lost 2% of its students because they moved and 10% for "other reasons," defined as "e.g. transportation, parents deciding the school was not a good fit for their student." No where on the open book, interestingly enough, can you find total enrollment figures, so you cannot determine how many students that is. As it is, though, this is kind of a non-starter-- 10% leave the school in one year for reasons other than moving? That does not seem to be an enormous amount, especially since we have no other baseline to go off of. However, a more pointed question to ask would be to break this 10% down in terms of overall enrollment figures, especially because KIPP says that they track all of this (footnote 3). That would please the critics and me.

Otherwise, minus some abysmal graphs (average growth purports to show one number between the two years, yet this shows 5th and 8th grade scores... are these just the average scores from each and the growth is between the two? Then what do the individual bars represent? And all of this contradicts the subtitle, "Average of 2004 - 2010 PSSA Data," which says that they subtracted two averages?), the document represents a supremely excellent step to quiet critics. Public schools don't make their teacher retention data available-- KIPP does, and it throws in some resumes and administrator pay scales to boot.

Senate Bill 441

In my second post on Pennsylvania's Race to the Top, I wrote on why Pennsylvania lost. I repeatedly mentioned Senate Bill 441, which among other things would have allowed approved alternative routes to certify teachers, thereby limiting traditional routes stranglehold licensing teachers, a notorious cash crop for them. Specifically, I wrote that:

...the stalled passage of State Bill 441 directly caused 10.6 of the 42.6 points to be lost in sub-criteria D1... the application comments state, 'yet despite votes in the house and senate that were overwhelmingly supportive of technical aspects of the bill subsequent senate/house reconciliation held up its passage. Because the law has yet to be passed and could still be a victim of politics medium points are awarded.' And the reviewers then withheld further points, and rightly so: the bill already was a victim of politics—why should they believe it wouldn’t later on?

Well, so what happened with the bill?

On November 22, it was presented to the governor-- completely stripped of any language that was promised at the time of the Race to the Top application. Take a look for yourself. Absolutely everything of any substance is gone, but at least some doctors can now sign some new forms.

Earlier I sent an email to Senator Vance, the sponsor of the bill, inquiring that "I have been following senate bill 441, and I was wondering at what point all language relating to alternative routes to certification was stripped from the bill and why it was done." We'll see if she responds.

What is sad here is that the application reviewers were completely right-- SB 441 went from something promising to something else altogether, further vindicating the decision NOT to award Pennsylvania any Race to the Top money.

College Bound

Recently, the Inquirer wrote this article that states that "Only 49 percent of Philadelphia graduates ever enroll in two- or four-year colleges."

Let's do a little work with that percentage. First, it's 49 percent of Philadelphia high school graduates-- so how many Philadelphia high schoolers graduate?

Well, a Notebook article told us that the "district's four-year, on-time graduation rate for the freshman class that started in fall 2006...[is] 57 percent."

OK, so only 57% of Philadelphia public high schoolers graduated, and of the graduates, only 49% enrolled in college. The actual percentage, then, of Philadelphia public high school students who attend college is not 49% but 28% (49% of 57).

So, if you walk into a Philadelphia high school classroom of 20 students, about 5, maybe 6, of them will go to college.